Darcey Steinke - Suicide Blonde

AFTERWORK MADISON TOOK ME TO A PLACE IN CHINATOWN JUST off Grant Street called the Buddah Bar. High black-vinyl stools and a sagging string of blinking paper lanterns lined the bar. When the bartender saw Madison he nodded hello and hit a little brass bell attached to the cash register. A slim woman appeared in an electrician's jumpsuit wearing round wire frames with rose-colored glass. She led us silently down the back stairs and along a narrow hallway to a metal door fortified by several dead-bolt locks. I swayed woozily. . time no longer held me. I felt lucky, freed, as I had been, by a fifth of bourbon. I watched a vein in Madison's temple pulse, stepped back so I could mouth, without her seeing me, “She is wild. . she is dangerous.” Madison pounded the door with the side of her fist.

“Open up,” she said. “It's me.” The eyehole darkened and then a melodious voice, I thought at first it came from inside my drunken head, said. . “Madison dear, hold on.” The tone was deep, but slightly tilted like a woman's. Keys jangled and the first of many locks clicked back.

“Habee is a hermaphrodite,” Madison whispered. “If you're nice to him he may show you.” She licked her fingers and smoothed her eyebrows. The door opened and there was Habee, a Lebanese man in coffee-colored silk pajamas, his long hair held in a braid down his back. He had small breasts like a teenager and was deeply tan like people who live out-of-doors.

“Delighted,” Habee said, swinging his hands open and kissing Madison. “If Madison hasn't told you,” he said, turning to me, “this is where it all leaves off.”

“This is a friend of mine,” she said as we stepped inside. “Isn't she lovely?”

Habee held my chin between his thumb and forefinger, forced my head to the left for a profile. Then took my hands, turned them over and back. He shook his head.

“I haven't seen anything like her since I was in Amsterdam.” He led us to one of the low tables in the middle of the room. Sweet smoke hung near the ceiling, the walls were tiled in mosque patterns of blues and greens, and maroon Orientals covered the floors. Four high standing candelabras gave the place plenty of light. No hard furniture to sit on, just pillows and several short wooden tables for hookah pipes. There were shadows behind the drapes dividing the room into private compartments and a soft smell of sweat. A man in a tuxedo was lying down with his hand propping up his head. His hair was slick and black and when he sat up to greet me, he kissed my hand.

“Better to search for heaven than not,” he said.

“Oh loosen up,” Habee said. “You're behaving all wrong.” The man got up, bowed, put one arm over his head and the other elegantly out to the side and tiny-stepped on his tiptoes away from us toward another group of people talking near the gold tile fireplace on the far side of the room.

“What'sa matter with Georgie?” Madison said.

“Oh, you know, he doesn't really like girls.”

“I do,” she said, pressing her shoulder against mine. I could tell she was glad I was here. She'd matched me shot for shot at Carmen's, but had gotten only more dignified. . more prophetic. She'd told me I'd eventually regret every night of my life except for this one. And with the bourbon surrounding everything with a lovely halo of melancholy, I thought, She is so right.

Habee lit the opium in the glass bottom of the hookah pipe and the perfumed smoke wafted toward me.

“I must tell you both,” Habee said, taking short puffs to keep the smoke coming, “about a trip I just took to Mexico. I went to see an old friend of mine. I had no idea it would be so fantastic. He and about twenty others stay in caves by the water. All day they swim and fuck. A woman brings their food. They just stretch out in the sun like otters, it was the most remarkable thing.”

“Sounds like you found your calling,” Madison said, accepting the pipe, adjusting the hose so the smoke could move easily into her mouth.

“No, my best times were in the circus. I had a lovely gown. . silk with blue roses. And there was a boy who gave me flowers. Really, he got quite obsessed with me and would wait until late to walk me to my trailer.” Habee took the pipe himself, puffed a thoughtful pigeon of smoke. “Anyway, it had to do with a rainy day and a back rub.”

“Sounds lurid,” I said, taking the mouthpiece and putting it to my lips. The smoke was smooth as milk.

“Yes?” Habee said, opening his eyes wide and waiting.

“Well.” I exhaled. “Did you hurt him?”

Habee smiled and took the pipe. “I assure you I did not. But that reminds me of a theory I'm developing. I think if men still hunted for deer or bear, more of them would be happy with their wives. Because now, you see, all men can hunt is women. It's terrible for them, their last connection to that savage wild man. They hunt. They kill.”

“Kill?” Madison said.

“You know, the moment a man comes, he's taken what he needs to feed himself.”

I felt queasy about his theory and about the little boy. I felt confused. I knew adultery was O.K., as was homosexuality and prostitution, but what about incest and older people taking advantage of younger ones? What about murder and cannibalism? It all made me uneasy because I could foresee being able to understand almost anything. I knew extreme behavior-hate, lust, domination — could be, as in Madison's case, just an extreme type of self-preservation. And I knew too that Habee would agree with Madison, that it was a weak and herdish thing to be “good.” Being nice was just a cover for weakness. I knew too that I was capable of knowing what was good for me, but doing the opposite. Once while I was home on Christmas break from school I slept with an old lover in some strange house he had the keys to. The sheets smelled like other people's bodies. My lover was melancholy, drank beers, brooded. It made me feel uneasy, even now, because I'd known it wasn't right to go there every evening to fuck and smoke cigarettes in a stranger's bed, but I did it anyway.

Everything around me seemed suddenly lushly alive. The ceramic patterns on the walls looked like DNA chains. Madison was talking about a john who had only wanted to kiss. “And he kissed so fake,” she said, “like he thought he was a movie star.”

She turned to me and put her lips on mine, opened her mouth and let her tongue wiggle around. Her mouth tasted of melon and I felt as if I were swimming in very warm water.

“The two of you are wonderful to behold,” Habee said, patting his heart.

Madison laughed and started to tell about a time when she was little. She'd forced all the kids in her neighborhood to take communion: wine made from poison sumac berries.

Had she really wanted to kiss me or was she showing off for Habee? Even her most intimate gestures were ambiguous. She was listening to him talk now about his mother, how she never woke, sleeping with her hands palsied up and the pee trickling into the clear plastic bag beside her. “It is a shame,” he said, “that such a precious spirit has taken flight.” Then Madison told about her mother, how she'd been raped and murdered in a lot behind the local grocery store, how the guy poured lighter fluid over her and set the whole field on fire.

“Jesus,” I said. “You don't just tell a story like that.”

They both looked at me, surprised the story startled me. Habee patted me coldly, turned to Madison, who told how the police had searched for the man though he was never found. Watching Madison talk I realized her coldness and cruelty were ways, known only to herself, of feeling more strongly than others.

Shadows shifted again behind the silk divider near us. A man breathed rhythmically and I could see a pelvis swaying against the rear and back of a bent figure. The sound of skin slapping skin reminded me of the skinheads. Madison touched my arm and said, “He's agreed to show you.” Habee was waiting, with his fingers splitting his pajamas, showing me his cunt, which was wide and lovely with folds and folds of pink skin. From inside came the limp cock, tiny balls too. I thought strangely of my mother, how she walked around the house in a half-slip, how she showed me rashes on her thighs, a pimple on her breast, how there seemed no delineation between her pain and mine. I asked, “Does any of it work?” He leaned toward me, his strong smell of cinnamon and the sweet smoke of opium swirled and he said, “It all depends on what you mean.”